I fear that if we fail in this, bulldoze our churches and let the machines of war and profit win over faith, then God will never forgive us. For that would be the worst sin of all.

Why Christians Must Support Gun Control

By RICHARD PARKERNOV. 11, 2017

SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Tex. — Here in rural Texas, the hay, baled and rolled, waits for winter. The corn is shorn and the stiff yucca stands guard in the dusk. I know this country; it is a short drive from my home, past places like the Devil’s Backbone and Purgatory to skinny Cibolo Creek, choked by mesquite and live oak. In Sutherland Springs, a family of five trudges in front of me in the headlights, past the police cordon, shuffling, heads down, apparently headed home. They call it God’s country, partly for its beauty, partly because it sometimes feels like God is the only thing out here.

As in many small Texas towns, the center of Sutherland Springs is the church. And if anything stands out about the worst mass murder in the history of Texas, which took place here last Sunday, killing 26 and wounding at least 20, it is this: a simple, white wooden sanctuary with the peaked roof, next to an unkempt field by a lonesome two-lane road.

Now they are going to tear it down, bulldozing it from the South Texas plain, as if doing so could remove the sacrilege of killing defenseless people during a Sunday sermon. This is what America’s response to mass homicide has come to. We don’t remove the killing machines that have put tens of thousands of Americans in their graves or hospital beds in this century, but we do demolish the First Baptist Church that has stood at this lonely crossroad for nearly a century. It is this doomed site, rooted in the black soil, that cries out for people of faith to act.

The killer, Devin Patrick Kelley, used his Ruger AR-556, with 15 30-round magazines, to shoot nearly 50 helpless, trapped people. The weapon is a variant of the AR-15, itself barely distinguishable from the M-16, the American military’s standard-issue infantry weapon. These, along with handguns, are the weapons of choice for today’s mass killers.

I won’t pretend to be more religious than the next person, nor am I afraid to call myself a Christian. Like a lot of Americans, I have a complicated relationship with my faith. But that shouldn’t lessen our sense of moral obligation in the face of what some blithely call the new normal. Nor should we fall for the siren call of more guns, the unproven good-guy-with-a-gun myth, something many of my fellow Texans have indulged in over the past few days. Instead, we have a duty to confront these machines and the profiteering behind them.


It is easy to feel numb, powerless and hopeless. For the dead, one can only grimace at that last moment of fear. For the survivors and their beloved, a harsh sentence awaits. First, there is the trauma, like an amputation, something C. S. Lewis wrote about after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, in 1960. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid,” Lewis, a Catholic, wrote in the slender and tortured memoir “A Grief Observed.” “The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.”

When traumatic death strikes, the most common question is, “Why?” The second most common question is invariably, “Where was God?” But the last and most troubling of all is, “What does God want?” It is the same cry that Jesus let out from the cross as darkness spread across the land: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

I won’t pretend to know the mind of God, so all I can offer is a simple guess at what he would say: Stop the killing. Of course killing will never end, completely; we are imperfect creatures of free will, prone to sin — the absence of good — as well as beauty. But that is categorically different from allowing the proliferation of machines solely designed to kill large numbers of people quickly, machines that bear no more semblance to a rifle than a nuclear weapon does to a firework. And the sin of omission — doing nothing — is nearly as bad as the murder itself.


In recent years, time after time, the AR-15 or one of its close cousins has played the starring role in an American mass shooting. In Las Vegas it shared a macabre double-billing with the semiautomatic version of the Russian AK-47. Chattanooga. Orlando. San Bernardino. Aurora. These two and the like are nearly always there.

And there is a reason. Because of the weapons’ quasi-military design, even an unskilled hand can pull the trigger 40 times in a minute. A typical hunting rifle will hold several rounds. A typical AR-15 magazine holds 30. There are at least five million AR-15-type weapons in this nation alone. Sturm, Ruger & Company, the Connecticut company that made the weapon used here, reported $664 million in net sales last year.

Here in Texas, the politicians have come and gone, visiting Sutherland Springs on a raw, rainy Wednesday night, making empty calls for prayers and excuses for inaction, as when Vice President Mike Pence awkwardly intoned, “Words fail when saints and heroes fall.” Indeed, they do. The words, bereft of real meaning, just blow away into the cold north wind. He appears to forget his purportedly deep religiosity.

Christianity demands action. It insists on the protection of the innocent. In the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas justified war in self-defense, but he also opposed the killing of innocent civilians. “Aquinas holds that causing the death of innocents in a foreseeable manner, whether intentionally or indirectly,” according to the Cambridge divinity scholar Daniel H. Weiss, “is never justified.”

And yet Christian evangelicals, particularly white Southern Baptists, have generally parted ways with Catholics on gun laws. Some are simply politically opposed to gun control because they are Republicans; others understandably distrust a society that does not seem to embrace God. But that opposition is crumbling. While six in 10 evangelical leaders report living in a household with a gun, nearly as many, 55 percent, favor stricter gun laws, according to an August survey by the National Association of Evangelicals.

“They accept the Second Amendment,” said Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals when the survey results were released. But they “also deeply grieve when weapons are used to take innocent lives.”

The same is true in Texas. Though some 37.5 percent of Texans own guns, according to an estimate by the Pew Research Center, tiny fissures have opened up in the state’s conservative political culture since the massacre here. Jason Villalba of Dallas, a prominent Republican state legislator, has called on the state’s political leadership to appoint a bipartisan commission to “focus on all possible causes of gun violence in Texas.”

At first, this might sound like a political dodge, but Mr. Villalba wants new gun restrictions on the table: “There needs to be common-sense gun control reform in Texas.” The Dallas Morning News, the state’s largest newspaper, quickly endorsed the plan: “Our goals ought to be simple. The most deadly kind of weapons should be harder to get.”

All the people of the Abrahamic faiths share the same duty — to protect the innocent. The Jewish bystander is to rescue a person in peril. Islam requires the protection of all innocent lives. I fear that if we fail in this, bulldoze our churches and let the machines of war and profit win over faith, then God will never forgive us. For that would be the worst sin of all.